Category: English

Another edition of stuff I found on YouTube which I thought you might appreciate.

1. I love a certain from of country music. This song came via Joe Bonnamassa on Twitter. A simple song with great atmosphere.

2. For a long time I have been fan of the interview format in longform, be it This Week in Startups with Jason Calacanis or Foundation with Kevin Rose. In this instance, Kevin hosts David Copperfield, who seems nice and has a couple of good stories.

3. Dream Theater, well, you know the drill. But wait, this guy plays Take the Time on an acoustic guitar, and if you are familiar with the piece you will be impressed by how far he takes it.

Lately I seem to spend a lot of time on YouTube. A. Lot. of. Time.
The amount of videos there that interests me is ridiculous but of course, I don’t have enough time. Just a very long “watch later” list.
But why should I alone have all the fun – here are the gems I found in January, from a musicians point of view of course.

1.Foo Fighters on recording “Wasting Light” at Dave Grohl’s house
The question was “what can we make different in recording this new album”. Fascinating. Sure it’s easy to go easy about a new album when you have millions in the bank but you still have to get the creative juices flowing in the right direction. Mission accomplished.

2. Guthrie Govan on Dunlop TV
I didn’t know about this guy until two years ago and he quickly came to be one of my favorite players. For one thing, he’s British, not only with the accent but also with a superb sense of humor, I could just listen to him talk for hours. On the other hand, he merges lots of playing styles with a level of fluidity that most guys are happy to reach in one style. This is just a peak, lots more to find.

3. Backyard Concert with Jason Mraz
All I knew was “I’m yours” but for some reason this clip made it into my watch later list. I watched about an hour of it and although it’s just him with a guitar on a makeshift stage I had the greatest time. He sings great, very witty, totally cool about the situation and being just a nice dude.

4. Rig Rundown – Aerosmith’s Joe Perry
Rig rundowns are fun. Basically a well-known guitarist explains his live setup, or as in this case, his guitar tech. Perry’s tech has a lot of work to do each night, I chose this rundown for that. For the curious: He does the switching, or Perry does, or not. The many guitars Perry takes with him may be for certain songs, but maybe not. At moments notice. This tech isn’t just tuning the guitars during the show, he works about as hard as Perry in my opinion…

Well there you have it, another year in the books. Have a look at my list from last year here. I finished 18 books total which is 7 less than in the two previous years. I have been focused on music so much, I guess something had to give.

For this year I went back to arranging all the books in one shelf again (pictured above). Which looks nice but is of course only half the story – 9 of the books that were added to the list during the year were Kindle books… (here is the list of the books on the picture)

Since I will probably be focused on music just as much this year I’ll read about the same amount which is fine. I noticed though that music books seem to work quite well 😉

What I like best however is to go back to previous years to see the history.

In the last two years music has taken a much bigger place in my life again. That’s a good thing. Although I get great input I usually start the year by checking out other people’s/magazines’s best of lists. I made some on Spotify, feel free to check them out: Mike Portnoy, Eddie Trunk, Guitar World, Music Radar.

As noted in the 2013 review I very much grew to like going to concerts again so that’s what I’ll try to focus on. There will be releases from Steel Panther, Flying Colors, Sebastian Back, The Brew, Adrenaline Mob and more to look forward to, but I intend to catch lots of concerts, focusing on the “small to medium”-sized acts.

Album of the year

2013 was a big year for releases of bands I liked, as noted last March. Many were good, some great, all meant something. My top 5 in no particular order:

#1: The Winery Dogs – The Winery Dogs / best rock album in years, very fluid, lots of soul
#2: Queensryche – Queensryche / great comeback album, so excited to see them back at full speed and they’re already in the studio
#3: Bleu – To Hell with you / great songwriting/composition and ‘new’ production that turned my ears into new directions
#4: Karnivool – Asymmetry / Slowly but steady Karnivool is turning into my favorite band, replacing the mighty Dream Theater. I love the textures, the sound, the quirky characters, overall feel.
#5: Sharron Levy – Rough_Ready / very solid debut from the former The Voice contestant. it grows with every listen and that’s all you can ask for.

I also liked a lot: Eminem – Marshall Mathers LP 2, Niacin – Krush, The New Roses – Without a Trace, Black Light Burns – The Moment You Realize you’re going to fall

Top concerts

I re-discovered how much I liked live shows and saw quite a few actually. Playing on Thursdays and Saturdays a lot myself I couldn’t attend every show I wanted but most I saw were fun.

Best moment: Bleu performing in my living room. I realize I haven’t written about this and I must, but suffice to say it moved me lots to listen to his great songs but also to share it with friends, family and neighbors.

Most rocking show: The Winery Dogs. There was so much soul and blues in their show, with the songs taking center stage, not the chops.

Best overall concert: Karnivool/The Intersphere. Best support act of the year, by far. Plus, I had high expectations for Karnivool – and they were met.

Best concert I missed: I should have not only interviewed Wes Borland but also stuck around for the Black Light Burns show. Others I didn’t see: Mark Tremonti, Sharron Levy, Queensryche (but in my defense, they didn’t play anywhere close)

Playing live

Our cover band Mrs. Jones was quite active last year with 27 gigs or so. It’s not enough to live on but almost too many to play as a hobby. Still, I enjoyed almost every single one of them and we’ll continue to pound the stages of the Reeperbahn. This year.

Original music

As mentioned I also got around to start a new band with my music but that is actually a story for 2014…

Another bad week for social networking in general and Facebook especially? Reading blog entries from Nico and Wolfgang, a heavily discussed Facebook post by moeffju plus the Business Insider piece “Facebook is a fundamentally broken product” one might get the idea that social networks have failed us, betrayed us and we should therefore draw consequences, like going away or praying for a better social network.

I think that’s rubbish.
When you throw more information into a system it gets fuzzier. End. Of. Story. And if you think technology is there to solve it you’re wrong. It might. In the future. Not even Amazon has it worked out, their recommendations engine breaks once you have more than 100 orders or so, just because of the variance from your ideal you.

Sorry, but when you have 5000 Twitter followers or 700 Facebook friends and complain that your experience sucks it’s just your own fault. You throw crap into the system you’ll get crap out.
The BI article argues Facebook fails us in not finding a good way to show 1,500 messages a day. 1,500 messages? Are you reading what you’re arguing? Who’d want to read that? Who in his right mind announces proudly “whoopee, inbox-zero” on the one hand and puts himself into such a mess on the other? (aside from social media experts who claim they “have to do this for work”)

I like Wolfgang’s piece because he seems well aware of the dilemma and shares how he uses social networks. I am not going to bore you with my take on it, let’s just say that I know where to find what interests me and what interests me finds me in reverse. And I sleep well knowing that I will miss things, life’s just too short to worry about that one rig rundown video on YouTube I didn’t see.

And I know. I still spend too much time on Facebook. But at least I know all the people there join my conversation regularly and I like them to do that. Because that is my criteria for adding people. And seriously, sometimes even 200 is too much.

On a final note let me remind you that this is “network is broken dilemma” is neither new nor is it the right argument. Go back in time 5 years and you’ll remember Robert Scoble had this figured out already, doing the big “unfollow-everybody and start over” with his RSS subscriptions and later with Twitter because it was too much to handle.
Let’s be real and acknowledge too much information breaks the system and it’s your job to limit the amount and quality of the input.